The lectures pair Harvard professors with celebrated food experts and renowned chefs to showcase the science behind different culinary techniques. The series is based on the Harvard course “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter,” but public lectures do not replicate course content.
Each presentation will begin with a 15-minute lecture about the scientific topics from that week’s class by a faculty member from the Harvard course. This week's topic is "Honorary Book Celebration Lecture."
Celebrated chef Marcus Samuelsson will share reflections on race, class, place and equity in the American food landscape, drawing from his forthcoming book The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food. He will then be joined by Professor in practice, Toni L. Griffin together with Thelma Golden and Mark Raymond for a conversation exploring the deep and intertwining relationships between memory, identity and authorship that exist for black creatives who reference, make and keep place through there work.
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Although Massachusetts formally abolished slavery in 1783, the visible and invisible presence of slavery continued in the Commonwealth and throughout New England well into the 19th century. Harvard professor Louis Agassiz’s theory about human origins is but one example of the continued presence and institutionalization of racism in the North.
Taking as a starting point the new book To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes, this panel of experts will examine the role and impact of slavery in the North and discuss the influence...
African cities are confronted by large youthful labour markets with limited prospects of formal industrial employment, on the one hand, and rapid physical expansion without the resources to address the massive infrastructural requirements to support people and economies, on the other. These daunting challenges are compounded by the impacts of the climate crisis and other forms of acute environmental risk. This confluence calls for situated innovations to reimagine and redesign investments in sustainable infrastructures that are simultaneously low-carbon, labour-intensive and geared...
How can we respond to the imperative of being in the now, of inhabiting the present? Can a work absorb the moment in time of its making without becoming like the news?
Inhabitant is about this question and how it has informed our work in filmmaking, art, and design. Referring to processes of sensing and inhabiting as practiced by non-human-species such as mushrooms and lichens, we will reference the work of Anna Tsing and Jennifer Gabrys, among others. In doing so, Inhabitant will explore affinities between sensing and cinematic capture.
Celebrate the glamour, labor, humor, and discoveries of archaeology at Harvard. Join student archaeologists as they share their experience with an Irish castle, a shaft tomb in western Mexico, monuments on the Giza plateau in Egypt and drones used to study El-Kurru in ancient Nubia, among other locations. Place a friendly wager on an atlatl (spear throwing) demonstration, observe chew marks on bones from the Zooarchaeology Lab and experience a virtual-reality view of the Great Sphinx.
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
The passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 did not "give" women the vote. Rather, it established a negative: that the right to vote could not be abridged on account of sex alone. This session brings together diverse participants who will each illuminate one facet of women’s political history at this key transitional moment. Together, participants will emphasize the radical achievement of the amendment, exploring the full implications of what it meant to remove sex as a barrier to voting, which resulted in the largest-ever one-time expansion of the electorate and mobilized a...
Join the Harvard Graduate School of design for a virtual lecture with Michael Murphy, Danielle Allen, and Sarah Whiting.
Michael Murphy is the Founding Principal and Executive Director of MASS Design Group, an architecture and design collective with offices in Boston, Kigali, Poughkeepsie, Santa Fe, Cape Town, and London. As a designer, writer, and teacher, his work investigates the social and political consequences of the built world. Michael’s research and writing advocates for a new empowerment that calls on architects to consider the power relationships of...
In this half-day virtual symposium, leading practitioners and scholars from three cities, Washington, DC, Detroit, and Boston, will explore efforts to bring equitable development to their communities and outline how they are responding to current challenges. The presentations and discussions will help students, scholars, community leaders, public officials, and others identify innovative strategies and successful approaches to advancing social justice in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.
Online—Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard
As the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow, Leslie M. Harris is completing “Leaving New Orleans: A Personal Urban History.” She uses memoir and family, urban, and environmental histories to explore the multiple meanings of New Orleans in the nation, from its founding through its uncertain future amid climate change.
American instincts oscillate between the allure of the city and that of life free of city stress; between the temptations of the metropolis, and bucolic retreat from those very centers of civic life. Such oscillation, occurring across American history, have on the one hand enabled the building of Manhattan, the ‘Capital of Capitalism’ (and culture, too) and the invention of the ‘garden suburb’ where family grace was to dwell, prior to metastasizing into sprawl.
Online—Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard
The artists Marilyn Pappas and Jill Slosburg-Ackerman met at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute in the 1980s. Decades later, their sustained friendship has led them to work in adjoining studios and teach generations of artists.
In this exhibition-opening discussion, Pappas and Slosburg-Ackerman will reflect on how their artistic practices have been shaped by friendship and the ways in which women’s art is shaped by the conditions of its making. Pappas and Slosburg-Ackerman will be joined in conversation by author Maggie Doherty.
Almost 200,000 acres of land in the fertile Mezquital Valley are irrigated with the untreated sewage of Mexico City. Every drop of rain, urban runoff, industrial effluent, and sewage in Mexico City is sent to the Mezquital Valley through a 60 kilometer pipe. Soils in this valley have been continuously irrigated with urban wastewater since 1901, longer than any other soil in the world. The capacity of these soils to produce conditions in which agriculture can be practiced safely and produce healthy crops depends on a complex negotiation between soil...
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian—Online
Join the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian for a virtual Public Observatory Night with guest lecturer Donavan Moore, author of "What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin."
It was not easy being a woman of ambition in early twentieth-century England, much less one who wished to be a scientist. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin overcame prodigious obstacles to become a woman of many firsts: the first to receive a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College, the first promoted to full professor at Harvard, the first to head a department there. And, in what...
Join Harvard Graduate School of Design for a virtual lecture with Rafael Moneo and Sarah Whiting.
Rafael Moneo, AM '85, was born in Tudela, Spain, in 1937. He graduated in 1961 from the Architecture School of Madrid. He was a professor in the Architecture Schools of Barcelona and Madrid, and he was appointed Chairman of the Architecture Department of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he is now Emeritus Josep Lluis Sert Professor in Architecture...
This lecture explores whether it is possible to achieve both social justice and environmental sustainability in efforts to mitigate urban flood risk. The expanding scale of urban flooding under climate change has renewed interest in large-scale restoration projects that make room for water in metro centers. However, ecologically functioning green infrastructure – unleashed rivers, sprawling wetlands – is inconsistent with the current governance landscape of fragmented local governments seeking to maximize local land values and minimize affordable housing. Moreover, even...
Author and journalist A’Lelia Bundles will read from her book "Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker" (originally titled "On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker" [Scribner, 2001]) and join Radcliffe Institute Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin for a discussion followed by an audience Q&A.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Adam Sella ’22 will consider different ideas of spirituality and how these are reflected in artwork we might not immediately consider to be spiritual.
The Ho Family Student Guide Program at the Harvard Art Museums trains students to develop original, research-based tours of the collections. These tours, designed and led by Harvard undergraduates from a range of academic disciplines, focus on select objects chosen by each student guide and provide visitors a unique, thematic view into collections.
Twyla Kantor ’22 will discuss storytelling in art and explore how the use of pose and body language can change an object’s narrative.
The Ho Family Student Guide Program at the Harvard Art Museums trains students to develop original, research-based tours of the collections. These tours, designed and led by Harvard undergraduates from a range of academic disciplines, focus on select objects chosen by each student guide and provide visitors a unique, thematic view into collections.
Tommy Mahon ’20 will focus on four artworks embodying aesthetic, political, and spiritual transformations.
The Ho Family Student Guide Program at the Harvard Art Museums trains students to develop original, research-based tours of the collections. These tours, designed and led by Harvard undergraduates from a range of academic disciplines, focus on select objects chosen by each student guide and provide visitors a unique, thematic view into collections.